Читать книгу Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders - Страница 15

Deserted highway, northern Manitoba

After that first Zodiac trip to Churchill, I reasoned that if I had found the polar bear of my dreams just thirty miles from town in a dinky Zodiac, there was no limit to what I might see during a whole summer out in C-Sick.

There was, of course, the small matter of getting two tons of boat across hundreds of miles of roadless wilderness to Hudson Bay. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and simply loaded C-Sick onto a northbound freight train, retracing my previous summer’s steps. But that felt like cheating. So instead, I envisioned a grand journey that would begin at the end of my driveway and ultimately deliver me to the top of the world. I started planning with nothing more than my outdated Rand McNally road atlas. I’ve always found something seductive about maps. They offer all the promise of travel and adventure and discovery, yet foretell nothing of the discomfort, misery, and expense my travels always seem to entail.

I traced the fat blue ribbons of American interstates to where they fed into an orange-colored line that marked the Trans-Canada Highway. From there, I could cross over the Rockies and traverse the rolling heartland prairie that spanned almost half the continent. After that, the path turned thin and red as it wound up into the northwoods of Manitoba, until finally dwindling to a tentative dotted track, like a string of breadcrumbs, that ended at a town I’d never heard of along a river I didn’t know existed.

If I could get past that last pinprick of a town, Gillam, and find the spot where my map showed the Nelson River flowing winding and blue, it would be only seventy-five miles to the vastness of Hudson Bay. From there, I’d hang a left at the river’s mouth and head north. It was only a couple hundred miles to Churchill. Beyond that, I counted five little dots, tiny towns or villages scattered along the coastline between Churchill and the Arctic Circle, more than five hundred miles north as the crow flies.

It sounded almost too easy.

Digging deeper, I read that the Nelson River once ran free, deep, and clear almost four hundred miles from Lake Winnipeg north to the Bay. That was until 1957, when Manitoba Hydro saw fit to run the first of what has become six dams to generate cheap electricity for cities far to the south. Cree Indian tribes once lived all across this rich interior. They paddled birch bark canoes along the river’s fast-flowing waters to hunt and fish and trade. The arrival of French and British explorers, traders, missionaries, and settlers resulted in the familiar litany of colonial exploitation: Eden despoiled, fortunes made, and the local First Nations cultures displaced and dispossessed and forever changed.

In truth, I wasn’t looking for a history lesson. All I wanted to know was if I could get my beloved, benighted C-Sick into the water, down the river, and out to sea. The internet was largely silent on the matter. Then I stumbled upon the Nelson Adventures website.

The owner and operator, Clint Sawchuck, worked for Manitoba Hydro by day, and ran a jet boat river outfit for the rare tourist who happened upon Gillam and wanted to travel downriver out to the Bay or the ghost town at nearby York Factory. When we talked on the phone, Clint said; “Yeah, sure, it’s possible. If the river’s up, you can make it.” He said there was a rough boat launch not far from town, but there was only enough water to float a boat when the Hydro company opened the flood gates and raised the river level by several feet. He also mentioned that it was more than 150 miles from the mouth of the Nelson River up to Churchill. “The old trappers would make that trip in big twenty-four-foot freighter canoes, wait for good weather, then run like hell. There’s not a bit of cover for a big boat along that whole stretch of coast.”

I put my fate in the hands of this affable stranger and set to work. I still had lots of questions. I found charts showing satellite views of the pack ice, lurid stretches of red that revealed thousands of square miles of impassable ice. I did some half-assed research on weather patterns and marine forecasts, but it all amounted to variations on the old song “Stormy Weather.” There was still a long list of things I didn’t know.

But I did know this much: everything about Hudson Bay was big, and in comparison, C-Sick was very, very small. But she was all the boat I owned, and she hadn’t killed me yet. I figured she could carry sufficient fuel and enough food to get me from one remote village to the next. After years of Alaskan boating, I was no stranger to cowering at anchor, and reckoned I could take whatever bad weather the Bay threw at me. And if worst came to worst, I could always run C-Sick up on shore and start walking home.

A trip like this could, and probably should, take years of preparation: a slow acquisition of the necessary skills and training and professional-grade equipment. Given enough time, anyone in their right mind would likely come to their senses and decide to stay home and catch up on the yard work instead. For me, it’s always made more sense to just go. Go before doubt creeps in, and then figure things out along the way. I wasn’t getting any younger and I imagined that, if nothing else, I could fail in truly spectacular and memorable fashion.

There’s a lot of talk these days about ultralight travel: bring only what you can carry on your own back. I’m more of a “bring-everything-and-thekitchen-sink” kind of guy. In fact, better bring two sinks, because I’ll surely break one.

First, I ordered maps. I bought a thick stack of nautical charts and topographical maps that detailed the coastline, from the Nelson River’s mouth and nearby Cape Tatnam all the way up to Fury and Hecla Strait, at the heart of the famed Northwest Passage some eight hundred miles north. Sure, past seventy degrees latitude the Arctic coast is perpetually locked in ice, swept by raging storms, and utterly suicidal for me to contemplate touring, but . . . I wanted to keep my options open.

C-Sick had suffered mightily through my clumsy and collision-prone Alaskan navigations. The few times I took her out on the water near Seattle, she started reluctantly and spewed smoke, apparently sulking. Someone needed a spa day. The guys at my neighborhood boat shop were notably unimpressed with my maintenance skills. They catalogued years of neglect and mistreatment, from fouled plugs and corroded carbs to mangled gears and a leaking head gasket. They made me feel like an abusive husband. The final tab of $2,809.89 gutted my bank account and still covered only half their long list of critical repairs. I figured my chances of getting all the way to the Arctic Circle, let alone back again, were at best fifty-fifty. By my distorted logic, authorizing only half of the needed work seemed a fair trade. I would get to the other half if I ever made it home in one piece.

The garage became ground zero for my planning. I searched the internet for every cheapskate deal and free shipping offer I could find, then began ordering mountains of food, like some paranoid hillbilly prepping for the end of days. I bought powdered eggs and canned ham, dried blueberries, salted nuts, an eighteen-pack of dehydrated vegetables, and two large vacuum tubes of chicken that resembled freeze-dried cat turds. There were pouches of Indian curry, boxes of Cajun beans and rice, and enough penne pasta to feed half of Sicily.

I even bought canned bacon. Bacon. In a can. Stuff you wouldn’t eat until the waning hours of the zombie apocalypse.

Something happens in my brain whenever I start planning a trip like this one. I couldn’t be trusted to tie a bowline knot or change a spark plug; my tool kit and its attendant collection of rusty spare parts were a joke. In the face of so many unknowns, I obsessed over the few tangible things, however meaningless, that I could control. Here, I compulsively gathered, labeled, and alphabetized two dozen miniature Ziploc bags filled with cooking spices.

I am all about priorities.

I unearthed layers of polypropylene long underwear that had seen me through one too many cold and mildewy Alaskan summers. But I was traveling alone, so why spend money on replacements? Anything new would smell just as bad by the time I was done with it. Instead, I blew more than a thousand bucks on heavy Gore-Tex bibs and a matching jacket at the Helly Hansen outlet store, then drove back the next day and picked out a one-piece survival drysuit. All of it was as stiff as cardboard and as fashionable as a fireman’s turnout gear. But the labels promised to render me impervious to hurricane winds and monsoon rains—if not from the withering scowls of actual yachtsmen. As a bonus, the survival suit was crimson red, convenient both for hiding bloodstains and improving the odds that a search and rescue team might locate my remains.

Over the decades, I have accumulated a small mountain of both camera gear and waterproof cases. Without too much regard for how it all fit, I set about cramming one into the other. I wasn’t limiting myself to the usual assortment of cameras and lenses, either. I needed underwater housings and radio triggers for remote camera traps, along with an array of tripods, clamps, cables, and mounts. I bought a first-generation Chinese-built drone, hoping to shoot aerial pictures with both feet planted firmly on solid ground. I made a list of every single thing I might conceivably use on a six-week shoot, then bought two of them. And sometimes a spare.

The immensity of the expedition weighed heavily on me, and the preparations became a welcome distraction. All through my life, I have been afraid of the wrong things. Collapsing glaciers? All in a day’s work. Large, unpredictable, and pissed-off wildlife? Bring it. Insurmountable credit card debt? No problemo.

It was grown-up life—with its sober commitments, responsible behavior, and the white-picket fence—that scared me stupid.

I spent decades of my adult life as if it was one long, college sophomore year. Then, to my considerable surprise, I woke up one day and realized I was about to turn fifty. Suddenly I understood that this would be my last chance to try growing up.

I had been dating a lovely woman for a few years. Like my mother and grandmother, she was a nurse, though unlike them she had left the operating room and moved into a new career working as a successful medical sales executive. When we began dating, my friends shook their heads and said, “Dude, you are so punching above your weight with this one.” As my semi-centennial approached, the topic of rings came up. Instead of running for the airport, I stuck around, and asked this beautiful woman to be my wife. Janet and I bought a sweet, old house in a quiet Seattle neighborhood. We adopted a dog. Together we began to perfect a normal, happy life together. It was the strangest sort of midlife crisis.

One evening while we were cooking dinner—well, Janet was cooking while I hacked away at some vegetables—I looked over in amazement and said, “We’re just like normal people.” And that, to me, felt like the purest kind of love. Nobody had to rappel off a mountainside that evening, or wrestle a python, or scuba dive beneath the polar ice cap. We could simply enjoy a home-cooked meal and a glass of wine and sit by the fireplace. It turned out normal was . . . nice.

And now I had something to lose by charging off with C-Sick. It frightened me in ways I couldn’t even name.

Reluctant to admit any of this fear directly to my wife, I unloaded on her co-workers instead. My third cocktail into a wedding reception for one of her colleagues, I blabbered to half the table that this was “the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done,” and “the scariest trip I’ve tried.” And “whatever you do, don’t tell Janet.”

This did surprisingly little to inspire confidence on the home front.

I did what I could to control the hazards I thought I might encounter. I had once believed that polar bears to be stone cold, blood-thirsty killers, an animal that would track you, hunt you, and skin you alive for the sheer ugly joy of it. The reality I’d seen in earlier forays to Svalbard and Churchill showed the animals in a more realistic light. Still, in fevered dreams I imagined a bear climbing over C-Sick’s white gunwales like one more iceberg and bursting through the cabin doors. Come morning light, there would be nothing left of me but a smear of blood, a pile of smelly long johns, and that damn can of bacon, still untouched.

All the same, I may have gone a little overboard with the bear protection. I found a tripwire fence that would emit a deafening shotgun-shell blast if a bear stumbled through its perimeter—great if you wanted to try reasoning with a wire-entangled, half-deaf, and fully enraged polar bear. I bought dozens of noisemaker shells and a pen-sized flare launcher, which was like the shittiest gadget from the worst Bond movie ever, a pen that goes “bang” . . . but not very loudly. I could deploy it in case stern looks and strong language failed to dissuade a marauding bear, or if I was set upon by angry marmots. In the end, I also packed last summer’s shotgun, along with its unused case of rifled lead slugs, and two more boxes of twelve-gauge bear bangers.

In late June, after months of preparation and weeks of buying, sorting, and packing, I finally loaded everything into my aging Volkswagen Touareg SUV. It was a truck created more for divorced dads venturing back into the dating game than for rigorous off-road use, let alone serious transcontinental boat hauling. With C-Sick in tow, my VW looked like a silver ladybug pulling some enormous bathtub toy. But it was already paid for. And it got the job done.

It was closing time at the local boat shop when I drove down to retrieve C-Sick and pay my exorbitant tab. After releasing her back into my care, the mechanics watched with amusement as I nervously lined up the ball hitch and boat trailer. I attached the trailer and drove off amid muffled sniggering. I hadn’t gone four blocks when, in the middle of traffic, I felt a sickening thud. I looked back to see the boat and trailer lurching skyward. Oh shit . . . I slammed on the brakes and the trailer hitch rammed into my truck, then bounced off, and started to roll downhill until safety chains brought it up short and yanked it back into the Touareg again. The process repeated itself two or three more times before both vehicle and boat trailer ground to a halt in the middle of the street.

In my haste, I’d failed to properly lock down the hitch. It could have been worse, of course. If I’d forgotten the safety chains, too, C-Sick might have careened back toward the sea in a kind of slow motion, made-for-TV-movie disaster that could have led to serious bodily harm and expensive legal action, and necessitated that I move to some other state—one that began with an I, like Iowa or Indiana or Illinois, a long way from any ocean. I might be stupid, but for once I was lucky. My neighbors, kind folk of humble Norwegian stock, refrained from mocking laughter. Some construction guys stopped their trucks, hopped out, and helped me block the trailer wheels and untangle the mess. One even lent me a shop jack to help pry the trailer’s hitch from beneath the undercarriage. Except for my embarrassment, the only real damage done was a shallow impact crater on the VW’s hatchback.

I drove the rest of the way home feeling rattled. This was going to be a long trip.

I packed the boat and stuffed the Touareg with all of my supplies. I made an agonizing seventeen-point U-turn to maneuver the VW and boat trailer on our narrow street: back and forth, back and forth. I blocked traffic for what felt like a week, burning with shame, until I was finally facing the correct direction. I pulled to the side of the street and nearly ran over a neighbor’s cat, then held Janet in my arms.

“I’ll call when I get there,” I sniffed, my eyes brimming. We had been doing this dance for years now. I always milked these departures for every ounce of drama. Janet, the trained healthcare professional, knew to tear off the Band-Aid in one clean, swift motion.

“You’re driving to Spokane. It’s six hours, but by all means . . . ”

As I turned the key to restart my truck and begin the long drive east, she looked at me with her clear blue eyes and said, “Try not to get yourself killed, okay?”

From long practice, Janet and I had settled into a routine for handling these long absences. When loneliness stalked me, I would call her after dinner from whatever campsite or foreign hotel I’d washed up in, recount the day’s anecdotes and indignities in a long monologue, then try to wrap up the conversation quick to save on long distance charges. This time, Janet was having none of it. Once I launched C-Sick, I was to call each evening and provide my latitude and longitude. She, in turn, would give me the marine weather forecast. After that, we’d begin another of our uniquely frustrating satellite conversations, filled with satellite delays and overlaps and “You’re fading” and “Can you hear me now?”

Two long, full days on the interstate took me as far as North Dakota. I hung a left and, after crossing into Canada, drove east on the Trans-Canada Highway, traveling parallel to a massive storm system tearing across the Saskatchewan prairie. The next morning, I drove past downed trees, power outages, and an aluminum canoe wrapped around a telephone pole.

Tornadoes in Canada? Who knew?

Lush farmland gave way to interminable spruce forest that stretched for mile after mile across northern Manitoba. Any time I stopped to pee by the roadside or stretch my sore back, a cloud of biting black flies swarmed in an angry circle. The grille of my truck was coated with a foul and sticky mat, and big, black ravens would descend to pick at their crushed remains.

The pavement ended in the gritty, nickel-mining town of Thompson, nearly eight hundred miles from the US border. From there, I still had two hundred more miles of rattling gravel roads to reach Gillam. Forest fires had swept through the area in the past weeks, closing the road for days at a time. The air remained thick with smoke even after the previous day’s rain, but I managed to navigate the rough gravel, dodging bigger rocks and sluicing through mud. As I drove on, it occurred to me that I had almost no plans for what would happen once I arrived. How was I going to get C-Sick into the water? Clint, my only local contact, had left a garbled cellphone message of vague directions to some boat launch a few days earlier, then departed on vacation.

Ten miles shy of town, I drove across the broad concrete rim of Kettle Dam. When I stopped in the middle and looked over the side nearly two hundred feet to the river below, I could see a winding dirt access road leading to an unexpectedly well-tended boat launch. Well, that seemed to solve at least one mystery. I drove down and backed the trailer into the surprisingly placid Nelson River, floated C-Sick, then took the boat out for a quick test run. Hell, this was gonna be easier than I thought. I dropped anchor and took my truck the remaining few miles to town to top off my fuel tanks.

I drove first through the town’s well-tended neighborhoods before reaching Gillam’s grittier downtown. The old train station looked derelict and half-abandoned, with plywood nailed over broken windows. I found the local Co-op store where I could fill my gas cans. I said something to the attendant about my plans for heading downriver all the way to the Bay from the nearby boat launch. He gave me a puzzled look and said, “Yep, you can go a-ways for sure. Twenty miles down to Long Spruce Dam, I’d say. But after that, I dunno . . . ”

So maybe that wasn’t the right boat launch after all.

I slunk back to the ramp, hauled C-Sick out of the water, then drove another fifty miles downriver. I went past not one but two more dams, to the sprawling site of a third dam under construction at Conawapa. Work had only recently started, but bulldozers had already cut a rough path down to the river. The cut ended at an uneven rock shelf that served as a crude boat launch. I wandered around the rocks in my rubber boots, trying to pick out some workable path into the water.

I couldn’t see the river bottom through all the silt, so I dug out an oar and started poking around, probing the shallows.

The water level rose and fell according to the inscrutable whims of Manitoba Hydro, which could release millions of gallons of water from the dams and raise the river by several feet. Or not. It was impossible to tell. I could have stood there until Christmas and never known for sure if it was safe to go. Sunlight danced off the river and filtered through a forest that seemed to stretch green and lush across the continent.

Finally, with a shrug, I began heaving a half ton’s worth of fuel cans, waterproof hard cases, and random boxes of food on board. Then, inch by inch, I backed C-Sick toward the river. My gut sank when the trailer dropped hard off the rock ledge, but when I looked back, I could see the water was just deep enough for my boat to float free.

I let out enough anchor line to hold the boat in place, then parked my truck and trailer off in a corner, seemingly out of harm’s way. I hoped they wouldn’t finish building that dam before I got back in the fall.

The only thing I could remember from Clint’s instructions was that the channel started on the far side of the river. I fired up both motors, then I stepped out onto the bow, hauled in the anchor chain, and headed out across the river and into swift, deep water.